I liked the three changes Jorge Barcellos made for Sunday’s game. Logterman got into the attack very well from the attack and Cinalli obviously scored a goal and got foward well too. And Welsh did well up front, and holds the ball better than Hanks. Hanks may be more valuable down the road, but as she transitions from college ball to pro ball, Welsh gives them more. Curiously, I talked with Barcellos a few days before the game and asked him about making changes to his offense and he pooh-poohed the idea, saying the L.A. game was just one bad game, you don’t need to take things apart after just one game. But he did. Vindication!

By the way, in case you haven’t seen it, we have video from the game and postgame on our website here.

Also, our multimedia staff has put together a spiffy Athletica roster/stats package here. The moving bar graphs on the stats are really neat. Depending when you see this, it may or may not have been updated after the Sky Blue game.

Barcellos said they’re still going to be cautious with Cinalli’s minutes as she gets back into game shape. Aluko said she hoped her hamstring injury wasn’t severe and she would be fine after a week of rehab. She said it was tight, but she hadn’t pulled it, that she stopped running as soon as she felt it get tight and immediately came out of the game. “A sprinter’s injury,” she termed it. Barcellos said Welsh still needed some time to get back into game rhythm after being out so long in L.A. Welsh and Barcellos had a long talk after practice last Wednesday; now, for all I know, Welsh was getting a rundown on Brazilian restaurants in the Metro East, but in any case, they talked for a good 15, 20 minutes after practice on Wednesday. (Though I should also note that with interpreting, any conversation with Barcellos takes twice as long as a normal one.)

National team coach Pia Sundhage was in the house. “Everytime I go, you win 1-0,” she said.

The official attendance was 3,124, which was the number of people who passed through the gates. That seems high to me, though the team said there were a lot of people standing on the north side of the grandstand. My guess was about 2,500. The rain certainly didn’t help, even though it was gone well before gametime. There was one lightning flash during the game that was 20-40 miles away, according to the handy-dandy lightning measurer. If it was within 15, they’d have had to pull everyone off the field and wait.

At the end of Sunday’s games, Athletica was tied for third with Boston and Gold Pride. (I really hate writing Gold Pride, by the way. Would anybody mind if I just called them Bay Area?) By goal difference and goals scored, they’re fourth. With a game against Boston coming up on Sunday, Athletica could be in second with a win and a Washington loss or tie.

And for those of you who don’t have Fox Soccer Channel, the league is now streaming all FSC games on their website. Which means you can see the St. Louis-Boston game on Sunday.

If there was a familiar refrain from Athletica afterwards, it was that the team has played well in other games and lost, so it was fair that they didn’t play well and won. “This was not our best performance of the season by a long shot.,” Lori Chalupny said. “Outside of about 20 minutes in the first half, we were pretty much throroughly outplayed.”

Slightly disagreeing with that was Sky Blue coach Kelly Lindsey: “I think overall they were the better team today. With that said, I thought we created some legitimate chances we could have scored off of. It wasn’t our best performance but in the end I thought we could have won the game. My hat’s off to them. They did a good job overall.”

I asked her about the Athletica goal in the first.

“We had a major breakdown in the first half and they took advantage of it. We were able to break them down a number of times and couldn’t take advantage of it. That’s the game of soccer, sometimes you don’t get the breaks.”

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I voted for L.A.’s Camille Abily for player of the week.

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In MLS, Taylor Twellman became the youngest player in the league to get 100 goals. He got his 100th on Sunday at 29 years, 100 days, beating Jeff Cunningham, who was 31 years, 360 days. So Twellman had some time. This was just his second game of the season as he’s recovering from several injuries, including whiplash.